The Last Samurai

He kept crying into the pillow.

I picked up the remote control and turned off the video. I picked him up and kissed him and I said Please don’t cry, and I took him downstairs to the warmer room with the gas fire. I said Would you like a hot drink, what about a cup of tea? Or hot chocolate, would you like some hot chocolate?

He said Hot chocolate.

I made him a cup of hot chocolate and I said What are you going to work on?

He said very softly Samuel.

I said Good. He got out the dictionary and the Tanach and Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar and he sat down near the fire to read.

I went back to the computer to type, and behind me I could hear the rustle of pages as he looked up word after word after word without asking questions.

An hour went by. I got up to have a cup of tea, and he said Is it all right if I ask a question now?

I said Sure.

He asked a question and he asked another question and he asked another question, and in connection with one of the questions I opened Gesenius to look at tithpa’el verbs, having looked at this and answered the question I began to leaf through the book. I would have liked to cry into a pillow myself, and with a sore heart I began to read these words of comfort:

§49. The Perfect and Imperfect with Waw Consecutive.

1. The use of the two tense-forms, as is shown more fully in the Syntax (§§106, 107, cf. above, §47, note on a), is by no means restricted to the expression of the past or future. One of the most striking peculiarities in the Hebrew consecution of tenses¹ is the phenomenon that, in representing a series of past events, only the first verb stands in the perfect, and the narration is continued in the imperfect. Conversely, the representation of a series of future events begins with the imperfect, and is continued in the perfect.

The author of the grammar discussed this marvellous grammatical feature with a kind of stiff scholarly charm, so that he would (for example) explain in a little footnote that ‘the other Semitic languages do not exhibit this peculiarity, excepting the Phoenician, the most closely related to Hebrew, and of course the Moabitish dialect of the Mêša ‘inscription’— just the three words ‘excepting the Phoenician’ were better than hours of the kind of help you can get on a helpline.

This progress in the sequence of time, is regularly indicated by a pregnant and (called wāw consecutive¹), which in itself is really only a variety of the ordinary wāw copulative, but which sometimes (in the imperf.) appears with a different vocalization.

I was beginning to feel almost not too bad.

I finished the section & then I turned to the cross-references in Syntax & then I read this and that & when I looked up two hours had gone by. L was sitting by the fire reading about David and Jonathan and singing a little song.

I gave him lunch and then another half hour had gone by. I returned to the computer & typed for three hours with only occasional questions from L. I took a short break and typed for half an hour; I took a break for dinner and typed for two hours; I put L to bed at 9:00 and went back downstairs at 9:30 and typed for three hours and then I went back upstairs.

It seemed to be rather cold.

I did not see how I could leave him upstairs in the morning and I also did not see how I could bring him downstairs.

The Alien whispered It’s only fair to give the other side a chance.

The Alien whispered He’s not a bad man.

I did not really want to go to bed knowing I was just going to wake up the next day. I put on three sweaters and rewound the video. PLAY.

A striking peculiarity of the film is that though it is called Seven Samurai it is not really about seven samurai. Bandits are about to attack the village and only one farmer wants to fight; without him there would be no story. Rikichi glared from the screen with burning eyes; his pale face glowed in the cold dark room.